A stereotype that gun owners are enabling

By O. Ricardo Pimentel/o.ricardo.pimentel@express-news.net

Updated 12:01 am, Saturday, August 13, 2011

There's this old joke about the heroic three-legged pig. A passer-by inquires about the missing leg. Regaling the questioner with the pig's derring-do — saving his life from a house fire, a raging river and an oncoming truck — the farmer finally explains the missing leg.

“You wouldn't expect me to eat a great pig like this all at once, would you?”

The NRA, though highly dependent on you, has diminished you into a caricature, a punch line. The uncaring — my-cold-dead-hands — defender of the unrestricted right to pack as much firepower as you want, whenever you want, wherever you want. No need to balance this “right” against anyone else's rights.

I wouldn't be surprised if you aren't feeling a bit of sawing on that other leg because of the latest from the NRA. As promised, it is suing to halt a new federal regulation requiring that gun dealers along the border report multiple sales of certain semiautomatic rifles, which, in the hands of drug cartels, might as well be called Mexican killers.

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A New York Times story says the legal complaint of the two Arizona dealers, on whose behalf the NRA is suing, explains that “the rule would be costly and that the dealers could lose business from customers who would be deterred from making a large purchase of such weapons because of loss of privacy.”

Um, yes. That's the point: That straw buyers will be “deterred” from buying these guns in bulk for Mexican drug cartels that are using them to indiscriminately mow down folks south of the border. They do this defending their presumed right to sell their drugs north of the border without restriction.

Gun dealers don't have an unassailable right to profit from this in the name of selling in bulk to others.

Not only is the NRA saying that you have an unfettered right to buy these guns in bulk without the kind of transparency the feds are newly requiring, they are saying that folks have the right to sell them. This is just the latest evidence that the NRA and the gun-manufacturing industry are locked in a loving embrace that threatens to squeeze the life out of the rest of us.

Yes, this includes even you gun owners who recognize no need to have multiple semiautomatics, weapons whose overkill capabilities make their purpose pretty transparent. It includes even you gun owners who recognize that not everyone can be trusted with an assault weapon that accommodates a 90-round snail drum — of the kind allegedly used to kill Bexar County Sheriff's Sgt. Kenneth Vann in May.

The NRA argues this new policy is illegal because it wasn't congressionally approved, as was an identical requirement for multiple handgun sales. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives notes that this rule on handguns sales was in existence and enforced before Congress codified it in 1986.

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Undoubtedly, all manner of levelheadedness permeates the ranks of legal gun owners. But you can thank the over-the-top demands of the NRA for the stereotype that suggests otherwise. Here's the thing, though: The NRA perpetuates this caricature only because levelheaded gun owners enable it.